Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

JoEllen DeLucia (Central Michigan University)

Ed. by Daniel Robinson, Widener University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.06: English Writing and Culture of the Romantic Period, 1789-1837.
Vol. editors: Robert Clark (The Literary Encyclopedia), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Daniel Robinson (Widener University), Emily Rohrbach (University of Durham)

Domains

Political Science
Women's Studies

Dates

First circulation or publication 1792

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-fictional prose

Resources

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered the ur-document of modern liberal feminism. Adapting the language of the rights of man that Wollstonecraft first tested in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her second Vindication applied the revolutionary rhetoric of universal rights to women. As a result Wollstonecraft’s essay has been considered alongside other eighteenth-century texts, such as Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) and Abbe Raynal’s History of the Indies (1770) as early attempts to transform the eighteenth-century discourse of the rights of man into what we now recognize as a more inclusive human rights discourse.

Both of Wollstonecraft’s Vindications were written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on Revolution in France (1790). Burke’s conservative critique of the fervor of the French revolutionaries...

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2650 words

Citation: DeLucia, JoEllen. "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 December 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6886, accessed 09 June 2026.]